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Overview

“The best all-around study of the American cowboy ever written. Every page crackles with keen analysis and vivid prose about the Old West. A must-read!” — Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

The open-range cattle era lasted barely a quarter century, but it left America irrevocably changed. Cattle Kingdom reveals how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We meet a diverse cast, from cowboy Teddy Blue to failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. This is a revolutionary new appraisal of the Old West and the America it made.

“Knowlton writes well about all the fun stuff: trail drives, rambunctious cow towns, gunfights and range wars . . . [He] enlists all of these tropes in support of an intriguing thesis: that the romance of the Old West arose upon the swelling surface of a giant economic bubble . . . Cattle Kingdom is The Great Plains by way of The Big Short.” — Wall Street Journal

“Knowlton deftly balances close-ups and bird’s-eye views. We learn countless details . . . More important, we learn why the story played out as it did.” — New York Times Book Review

“The best one-volume history of the legendary era of the cowboy and cattle empires in thirty years.” — True West

About the Author

CHRISTOPHER KNOWLTON is the author of Cattle Kingdom and a former staff writer and London bureau chief for Fortune magazine. He spent fifteen years on Wall Street, most of them as president of Knowlton Brothers, Inc., an investment management firm. He is a trustee of the Teton Raptor Center and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. He and his wife, Pippa, live in Jackson, Wyoming.

Read an Excerpt

PART I: BIRTH OF A BOOM

1 The Demise of the Bison

On January 13, 1872, twenty-two-year-old Grand Duke Alexis Romanov, the fourth son of the Russian czar, arrived in North Platte, Nebraska, by private railcar, accompanied by an entourage of courtiers in gold-brocaded Russian uniforms. The grand duke was there for a buffalo hunt. Two companies of American infantry in wagons, two companies of cavalry on horseback, the cavalry’s regimental band, and an assortment of cooks and couriers had been assembled to meet the duke at the train station. His American hosts included luminaries such as the distinguished Civil War veteran Major General Philip Sheridan, at that time the commander of the U.S. Army Department of the Missouri, the renowned Indian fighter Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, and William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who later became famous for his traveling Wild West show. The entertainment in the wilderness included a lavish feast among the tents erected at Red Willow Creek, and a meet-and-greet encounter with local tribal chiefs, including Chief Spotted Tail of the Brulé Sioux, who had been coaxed into joining the expedition, along with four hundred Sioux warriors, in return for a payment of twenty-five wagonloads of flour, sugar, coffee, and tobacco. The Americans may well have hoped that Spotted Tail would appear in his famous war robe, which was adorned with over a hundred human scalps taken in battle, but instead he wore a white man’s two-piece gray worsted suit, a rather old one, with a blanket thrown over his shoulders. For entertainment a group of Spotted Tail’s warriors performed their traditional war dance. The first morning’s hunt found the group galloping over a hillock and down onto a large herd of grazing bison. According to Cody’s embellished account, the duke proved to be a poor shot. He fired his pistol erratically at the largely docile bison from horseback and missed them at a short distance. It wasn’t until Cody handed the duke his own Springfield Model 1863 rifle, nicknamed “Lucrezia Borgia,” that the Russian noble managed to fell his first animal, an event that immediately produced much waving of flags and hats and a champagne toast. The duke leapt off his horse and used his saber to slice off the bison’s tail as a trophy. The next day the duke managed to kill two more bison. In total, during his five-day hunting trip he would slay eight, including a pair that he allegedly shot from the window of his private railcar somewhere outside Denver. He returned to Russia with their tails, mounted heads, and tanned hides as keepsakes. Nothing like the so-called Great Royal Buffalo Hunt would ever again occur on American soil. Just three years later such a hunt would be impossible: the bison would be gone.

For the first ninety or so years of their new republic, most U.S. citizens viewed the open areas of the America West as a barren wasteland of no intrinsic or economic value. It was seen as a geographical hinterland, the Great American Desert, fit habitat only for the “savage” tribes of Plains Indians, despite the fact that it covered several hundred million acres. This vast area comprised the Great Plains, the High Plains, the semi-arid prairies, and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and it stretched from the Missouri River abutting the present border of Iowa westward to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Red River along the present Texas-Oklahoma border northward to Canada. This dismissive view of the wide-open expanses of the America West persisted because of a poor understanding of the land’s ecological diversity and ignorance of the the fact that the area provided forage for herds of buffalo that numbered in the tens of millions. The Native Americans who occupied these territories, some two dozen tribes of varying sizes, took a far more enlightened view of the region ​— ​and lived in a more ecologically minded and spiritual harmony with it. For many of these tribes, their culture and livelihood depended on proximity to the bison, whose animal parts they used to clothe, house, arm, and feed their people. And the Native Americans’ dependency on the bison may well have involved more than a somewhat passive harvesting of resources that nature provided. It is likely that for perhaps two thousand years the Plains Indians proactively farmed the buffalo on the Great Plains, treating the area as one gigantic pasture under their jurisdiction. They may well have used fire to remove what once was forest, to encourage the growth of the grass for bison forage ​— ​a thesis, if true, that debunks the popular myth of the American West as an unspoiled, pristine wilderness at the time of European settlement. Those who saw the great bison herds never forgot the experience. The largest herds appeared to blanket vast valleys in their black fur, in numbers rivaling anything seen on the African savannas. In 1839 Thomas Farnham, riding along the Santa Fe Trail, reported that it took him three days to pass through a single buffalo herd, covering a distance of forty-five miles. At one point he could see bison for fifteen miles in every direction, suggesting a herd that encompassed 1,350 square miles. In 1859 Luke Vorrhees claimed to have traveled for two hundred miles through a single herd somewhere along the border of Colorado and Nebraska. And a dozen years later, Colonel R. I. Dodge passed through a herd along the Arkansas River that was twenty-five miles wide and fifty miles long. The artist George Catlin, paddling a canoe on the Missouri River in the Dakotas, came around a bend and encountered one such immense herd as it forded the river. The swimming, snorting animals had effectively dammed the water. Catlin and his terrified companions managed to pull their canoes ashore just seconds before being engulfed by the herd. They waited for hours as the bison crossed, watching them shuffle down from the green hills on one side, swim across in a solid mass of heads and horns, and then gallop up the bluffs on the far side. During this time the bison managed to obliterate a fifteen-foot-high riverbank, carving their own road up and out of the river. The white man’s perception of the plains and prairie lands finally began to change with the rapid economic developments of the decades just prior to the Civil War: the collapse of the fur trade, the discovery of gold, the arrival of the railroad, and the westward flow of immigrants along the Oregon, Santa Fe, and Mormon Trails. By the early 1860s former fur hunters and California-bound settlers, trailing the odd cow along with their oxen, had helped to introduce the first small herds of cattle to the western forts and outposts. Grocers and merchants, seeking to feed the arriving miners and railroad workers, introduced other small herds. The earliest cattlemen of the West, figures such as John Wesley Iliff, a former grocer who assembled a herd outside Denver in 1861 to service the railroad crews, began to believe that domesticated cattle might be able to withstand the long winters and the aridity of the climate. If this surmise was correct, big money could be made in cattle ranching on the open range. Iliff’s contracts with the railroads and the army forts eventually proved so lucrative that he was able to buy more than a hundred miles of land along the South Platte River in Colorado. Over time, his rangelands became so vast that he could ride for a week in one direction without sleeping anywhere but in his own ranch houses. He would be the first to earn the sobriquet “cattle king.”

Editorial Reviews

Christopher Knowlton's aim in Cattle Kingdom is to place those emblems of freedom, and their whole industry, in its true context…Knowlton…has a sharp eye for details…but his real aim is the big picture. Cattle Kingdom is a cautionary tale of boom and bust. Despite the gunslingers and cowpokes, this lively history evokes the headiest days of the housing bubble of the early 2000s or the tulip mania that hypnotized Holland in the 1600s. The analysis does not bog down the storytelling. Knowlton deftly balances close-ups and bird's-eye views. We learn countless details…More important, we learn why the story played out as it did…

The New York Times Book Review - Edward Dolnick

04/17/2017America’s Wild West is popularly remembered for its hard-drinking cowboys, “bat wing saloon doors,” and quick-draw gunfights, but Knowlton, former London bureau chief of Fortune magazine, triumphantly upends such familiar images. He describes life in the Wild West instead as a much richer and more diverse experience, where the hardships Westerners had to endure for the good of the cattle temporarily blended cultures and classes. Knowlton ties his narrative together by following a few historic figures from the inception of cowboy culture to its barbed-wire-induced death knell, sprinkling in lively stories about the birth of cattle towns and herds spooked by thieves. Englishman Moreton Frewen, Frenchman Marquis de Mores, and American Theodore Roosevelt represent for Knowlton the “cowboy aristocrats” whose optimistic and naïve leaps into ranching resulted in ruin for the first two and transformed the third into the future “conservation president.” Excerpts from trail driver Teddy Blue Abbott’s autobiography provide a cowboy’s perspective, demonstrating Abbott’s cheeky antics, well-founded self-confidence, and numerous life-threatening experiences. Knowlton’s quality book would be even stronger with more accounts from the cowhands, particularly from former Confederates fleeing the South or liberated slaves looking for pay equality. Knowlton’s absorbing work demonstrates that the years of lucrative cattle driving may have been short, but meatpacking and transportation innovations and the rugged individualist ideology of the West maintain their place of importance in American life. Agent: Jeff Ourvan, Jennifer Lyons Literary. (June)

Publishers Weekly

“Lively . . . Analysis does not bog down the storytelling. Knowlton deftly balances close-ups and bird’s-eye views. We learn countless details . . . [but] more important, we learn why the story played out as it did.” – New York Times Book Review “Cattle Kingdom is the best all-around study of the American cowboy ever written. Every page crackles with keen analysis and vivid prose about the Old West. A must read!” — Douglas Brinkley, author of Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America and The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America “A fresh look at the U.S. cattle industry . . . This vastly informative volume will be of interest to general readers and a welcome addition for all library collections.”—Library Journal “Quality book . . . Knowlton’s absorbing work demonstrates that the years of lucrative cattle driving may have been short, but meatpacking and transportation innovations and the rugged individualist ideology of the West maintain their place of importance in American life.” —Publishers Weekly “An informative and well-written examination of a key area.” —Booklist “Cattle Kingdom accomplishes the rare feat of capturing the worlds of cattlemen and cowboys in all their color, while also covering well the global economic and environmental tides that made the cattle kingdom rise and fall.” —Stephen Aron , president of the Western History Association and the Robert N. Burr Department Chair, UCLA Department of History “A pleasing contribution to the history of the post–Civil War frontier.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

05/01/2017Knowlton, former staff writer and London bureau chief for Fortune, offers a fresh look at the U.S. cattle industry, with an emphasis on its financial aspects, especially as it exemplifies the boom-and-bust cycle of business. The author details a wide variety of topics, including the birth of cattle towns along the railroad, demand for beef in eastern cities, cattle drives from Texas to Kansas along with the Chicago stockyards, and the growth of business centers such as Cheyenne, WY. He also touches upon cowboys, homesteaders, rustlers, vigilantes, foreign investors, the winter of 1886 (known as the "big die-off"), and myths of the Old West. Colorful, larger-than-life personalities are featured throughout: Teddy Blue Abbott, Theodore Roosevelt, Moreton Frewen, and the Marquis de Mores. Knowlton includes almost every known fact and story about the cattle frontier, drawing upon standard primary and secondary sources. The major contribution of this volume is the author's financial perspective, thus emphasizing the speculative aspects of the range cattle industry during the Gilded Age. VERDICT This vastly informative volume will be of interest to general readers and a welcome addition for all library collections.—Patricia Ann Owens, formerly at Illinois Eastern Community Coll., Mt. Carmel

Library Journal

2017-03-07History of the boom-and-bust cycles of the cattle industry in the wildest days of the Wild West.Former Fortune magazine London bureau chief Knowlton knows a good business story when he sees it, and if the business of America is business, the nation's business of the late 19th century was conquering the frontier and converting it into a feedlot and granary. The open-range cattle scramble lasted only a few decades, but it gave the larger world the stereotype of the cowboy as a "curious blend of American everyman and chivalrous Victorian nobleman," with a hint of crusading knight thrown in for good measure. Among the figures who populate the author's set pieces are Teddy Blue, who came as close to that ideal cowboy as anyone on the prairie, and the well-studied Teddy Roosevelt, who sought to expand his fortune as a rancher on the Dakota plains. Knowlton moves dutifully from topic to topic, from the technological developments of wire fencing here to the makings of sonofabitch stew there, enough to satisfy readers with a passing interest in the Old West but only wet the whistles of buffs. Readers raised on the revisionist histories of Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick may find Knowlton's emphasis on Anglo cattle barons and necktie parties a little old-fashioned. The author's background in finance comes in handy when he turns to the economics of cattle, perhaps the best single aspect of the book: "The price of shares in existing cattle companies declined sharply," he writes of one episode involving protectionist legislation, "making it impossible for new cattle syndicates to be formed or for existing ones to make more money." Knowlton's account of the so-called Johnson County War, pitting big business against small "nesters" in Wyoming, is excellent, a story complete enough to make a book within a book. Though without the encompassing narrative fire of a Stegner or McMurtry, a pleasing contribution to the history of the post-Civil War frontier.

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